Zen and the Art of Sabbath Keeping

Propers: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 21), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Sabbath probably isn’t what we tend to think it is.

It’s a very churchy word, isn’t it—Sabbath? You don’t hear it very often outside a Sunday morning. It’s become a religious term divorced from daily life. But what’s it for, really? What does it mean?

For much of Christian and indeed American history, keeping Sabbath meant coming to Church. Show up, confess, receive absolution, hear the Scriptures, share the peace, Commune, all that good stuff. Then go out and bear Christ to the world. Yet the Scriptures speak of Sabbath long before we had a Church. And it’s not on Sunday, is it? The biblical Sabbath is Saturday; it starts on Friday night.

But why is it such a big deal? Why does it merit one of the Ten Commandments? The Sabbath is arguably the defining characteristic of the Hebrew and Israelite people, even more so than circumcision, more so than the Torah. What set the people of God apart was that they kept the Sabbath. So highly is it held that it’s codified in the first chapter of Genesis. On the seventh day, God rests—whatever that means. The Sabbath is the capstone of Creation.

Some have called it the world’s first labor law. In ancient times, only the wealthy could afford to have true leisure; only those with enough slaves, enough servants, enough serfs, to have the labor done for them, to accrue both time and wealth. And this freed the elite to contemplate the higher things of mind and spirit: philosophy, literature, poetry, art, theology; the very things which make us most human.

The Sabbath democratizes that. Before we had a weekend, before we had a 40-hour workweek, we had the Sabbath, one day on which to rest. And it wasn’t to be wasted on the lazy. The meaning of the Sabbath was not merely self-indulgence. The Sabbath was a sanctuary in time, the purposeful cultivation of spiritual leisure, indeed, a space for holy boredom. And into this openness flow creativity, imagination, contemplation: truly, divine gifts for rich and poor alike.

These days mindfulness is all the rage. Take the time to meditate; take 15 minutes to focus on your breathing; that sort of thing. And we need an app for it, don’t we? We need some sort of digital aid directing us, because it’s alien to our culture. We have been raised by consumerism. We can’t avoid it: it’s in the air we breathe, the screens we watch, the food we eat. We are all trained to think of ourselves as consumers, so that we divide our day into either productivity or consumption.

In other words, we’re either entertaining ourselves—which includes shopping and eating—or we’re earning money with which to entertain ourselves, to buy things. We produce to consume and consume to produce. But it wasn’t always so. We used to have the tradition, the spiritual practice, of holy silence, holy boredom: time set apart just to be and not to do. We don’t know what to do with that now. We’re petrified of silence. We’re ashamed of inefficiency, of not being productive.

That’s why Church confuses a lot of postmodern people. What’s it for? Is it productive, or consumptive? Does it make us money, or does it entertain us? And I’ll be the first to admit that there are some churches that exist for making money, and some that are all-in on wild entertainment. But that’s not Christian; it’s just American. The same holds true for civil society as a whole: for book groups and bowling leagues and Boy Scouts and anything that requires in-person voluntary commitment. If it doesn’t make us money, or produce what we consume, we are simply baffled.

So, yeah, I don’t think that falling Church attendance is a religious problem per se, because it reaches far beyond the bounds of organized religion. But it is spiritual. And it is a spiritual problem because we don’t have Sabbath rest. We don’t know what it is to just sit and be human, to be bored and be at peace in a truly healthy way.

Every faith has a contemplative tradition. Every faith knows that God is found in the silence. So much of Zen practice is just learning to sit still. If we cannot find silence, then we cannot hear God. And if we cannot be at rest, we are robbed of being human. We’re all then just beasts of burden, now with anxiety.

Of course, in the Scriptures, beasts of burden are to have a Sabbath too. Even the land gets one out of every seven years to rest, because Creation is good in itself. It needn’t always be productive, needn’t always be at work. Nature is intended just to be. Would that we had learned this long ago. The Sabbath is wholistic, ecological. Rest is part of Creation, indeed the part that makes it whole.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus falls afoul of certain religiously minded people when He dares to heal a woman on the Sabbath. “Ah-ah-ah,” sayeth the scribes, “that looks like work to me! And thou art not to work on the Sabbath.” They are punctilious in keeping the Law, in keeping the Sabbath. But they seem to have forgotten what it’s for. The Sabbath is not some arbitrary rule intended to set people apart, to make us holier-than-thou.

The purpose of the Sabbath is humanity. It is for healing, for liberation, for the establishment of human dignity. Jesus cures a woman who had suffered 18 years. He restores her to health and to wholeness and even to her community. It is all pure grace. “The Sabbath was made for Man,” Jesus teaches, “and not Man for the Sabbath.” It isn’t just about keeping the letter of the Law, but remembering the purpose of the Law, the reason we should keep it in the first place.

The Law is not intended to place burdens on our backs, but to break our bonds, to set us free—free from dehumanization, from commodification, from the exhaustion of spiritual sterility. The Sabbath makes us human. The Sabbath sets us free.

Now, it is true that we as Christians are not bound to keep the Sabbath as our forebears did of old. There is no one Sabbath day for us, be it Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. But we are enjoined to take the time to listen to God’s Word; and this means more than simply reading the Bible, though of course we should be doing that.

We must make for ourselves sanctuaries in time: little Sabbaths when we are not earning, we are not spending, we are not doing. We simply are. We listen. We breathe. We love one another. We welcome leisure without laziness. And this opens us to higher things: to art, to music, to ideas, to experience. It engages the mind, yes, but it also transcends the mind, into the realms of spirit. This is where dreams are made. This is where we sub-create with God.

Maybe this could mean just turning off our phones from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. A little technology fast can make for a Sabbath of the soul. I recently read that 25 years ago people fled to the internet in order to escape from the real world; and now we flee to the real world in order to escape from the internet. I’m not entirely a Luddite; connectivity can be good. But it can also be a lot of noise. And for as easy as virtual community is, it will never take the place of real life. I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.

Look, I’m not saying that there’s a one-size-fits-all Sabbath. You alone may know what brings your spirit inner peace. It might look a whole lot different for an introvert than it does for an extrovert. But keeping Sabbath should be liberation. It should be both release and relief. It is the reminder for us all that we are so much more than merely our careers and our consumption.

We are the kings and the queens of Creation, made so by the Cross and the Crown of the Christ. The Sabbath is necessarily spiritual simply because people are spiritual; the world is spiritual. To forget that is to forget ourselves, as we so often do.

It’s either the Sabbath or slavery; it really comes down to that. And if the Exodus taught us anything, it’s that God would not have us be slaves.

Make room in your life for the Sabbath. Be quiet, and holy, and free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.